Changes and continuities since the publication of "Classes. Literature and Dissidence" by Daniel Link

Not fourteen days had passed since his last class in Puán –at the headquarters of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA–, when on July 9, 2024 Daniel Link signed the prologue to the second edition of Classes. Literature and Dissidence (Eterna Cadencia, 2025), a book published in 2005 and which this year, exactly twenty years after its first edition , reappears in bookstores.

A first question that emerges, comparing both editions, concerns the many things that have happened in these twenty years. One fact stands out in response: in 2005, Daniel Link was one of the most distinguished professors in the Humanities program at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). His classes, to which he dedicates hours of preparation, are attended by a multitude of students who renew their classes semester after semester. To this teaching work, Daniel Link adds his Barthesian-Foucauldian style of "classroom writing."

Classes. Literature and Dissidence is not a transcription of recorded tapes (as is the case with courses like Michel Foucault's 1976 "The Birth of Biopolitics" at the Collège de France). Rather, Link "writes" his lectures, in a complex process of "writing for lectures" and "lectures for writing." Following How to Read and Other Critical Interventions (2002), one of his major books, Classes is the book in which Daniel Link begins to explain a "method."

He defines himself as a professor, teaching literature courses and writing about topics and works that, like his students, fill the renewed, anti-stifling atmosphere of universities. In 2025, twenty years later, and after the book's reissue, Daniel Link no longer teaches literature at Puán.

But beyond biographical references, data, political and cultural events: what exactly, besides the pandemic, happened between 2005 and 2025? A hypothesis confronts us. It's possible that the dividing lines—the world's classification lines—have blurred somewhat. This better sheds light on the relevance of the political projects that seek to restore them.

The most interesting thing, rereading Link's book, is that the shifting of the lines that organized culture—experience, life—has not turned out to be so unpredictable as it is natural. One conjecture that emerges, not necessarily directly but definitively from the pages of the book, is that we are facing a widespread disarray of all classification systems.

One hypothesis about the present might be this: that we are in the age of all classification disorders . The urge to name, to give a name to our era—no era has represented itself as much as the present—could be, paradoxically, the great symptom of our disengagement with taxonomies. This fact could be providing one of the greatest keys to the current era.

We are witnessing a crisis of the classificatory orders imposed on us by positivism in the 19th century . Since the Enlightenment and Encyclopedism in the 18th century. And since Modernity in the 20th century. We are thus witnessing different crises, because the classificatory orders crumbling before our eyes are also different. If this hypothesis is correct—still in light of other crises of previous classification systems—what is emerging is that it is the crisis of classifications—and not the crisis of a particular classification system—that would be dictating the pulse of our time.

As if what had mattered up to now in history had not been so much that one old system of classification triumphs over another, but that a certain order finally prevails, thus granting some kind of peace even to the defeated.

In this context, what is most alarming about the current situation is that we are facing an explosion of the very notion of "classification" as a mode of organizing the world, life, and societies. From this perspective, we may be in a moment of transition. Humanity is struggling with a new "threshold."

The paradox is that the disarray of classifications occurs in a context of ubiquitous labeling programs , highlighting the extent to which the triumph of classifications could be a symptom, through saturation, of their own downfall: hashtags, cloud-bound, tags; whether these are computer or cultural, corporate or parastatal.

At the other extreme, given the expiration of the modern itself as a category, the question also arises as to whether we might not be witnessing the reestablishment of old orders—such as those inherited from scholasticism or the Middle Ages. "Techno-feudalism" and "post-democracy" are just a few of the many terms proliferating on the networks, amid presumptuous intersubjective and algorithmic races to name the current.

Following the formality of great books, Classes is also preceded by its own “prologue to the second edition.” In addition, among the book's additions, we find the two new chapters at the end: “1965” and “Folklore.” But among the new additions, we can also find paragraphs like the following, on page 101: “In a time like ours, which has shattered all the certainties associated with bourgeois humanism, humanitas trembles, as in Terminator, before the relentless advance of the machine. Artificial intelligence threatens the very status of the human and places the 'human condition' on the threshold of a transformation that will annihilate the old universals.”

The addition reads like a strong defense of literature, that antiquity that resists the ominous intrusion of the artificial : “But perhaps the step backwards that would mean a refuge in pure spirits and noble souls is not the best policy to get out of the quagmire, but rather a new agency with nature and with machines, which finds in language games (among which literature remains the most sophisticated, the most audacious), at the same time, the support of some humanity and a survival strategy in an increasingly mechanized and digitalized world.”

In this sense, Classes can be read as a manifesto in favor of the classroom —after the end of the era of the professor. A manifesto in favor of personal encounters in classrooms, in the hallways, in the faculty—in times of threatened public universities. And of rites of passage: those that occur in the "in-betweens," between hybrids, and in the always singular intersection of classifications.

As if they were characters from a well-known story that precedes and justifies them, different eras and concepts appear throughout the book. Thus, we see references to the Beat, Pop, and Folklore parading throughout the pages. But also to the Bestseller, the Gay, the Absurd, the Public, the Intimate, the Novel, the Theater, and the Genres.

And amidst the series, some dichotomies are hinted at: only to remind us that it is the oppositions, as well as the models of world organization, that always define us. The opposition between Interior and Exterior, or between Culture and Intimacy, is presented to us as a way of weaving together the personal with the political: the interior (of the family, the classroom, institutions) is not only a way of reminding us that there, in the interiors we inhabit, the physiognomies of the exteriors that besiege us are also outlined: in the open air, adrift, outside the law.

Different concepts in dialogue with literary works belonging to the 20th-century canon parade through the interior of a work driven not only by the impetus to reflect on flaws, moments of danger, or escapes from classification systems, but also to highlight the many categories we lack. The impossible of classification obsessions is the capture of all that exists.

Reread in its new version, we might find ourselves making new underlines. It's not the book's relevance that's most surprising— in 2005, Classes could have been read as the book of a true libertarian, never better said . Read in 2025, it remains the book of a true libertarian, still drawing on the anarcho-technological and precursory fantasies of the early 21st century, promoted by stellar hackers of the time like Linus Torvalds and Pekka Himanen.

What cannot be classified is the most political aspect of art, because it strives to subvert the order of the legible. Art is beyond classification because, quite simply, works, like life, breathe singularity.

Classes is an open book, written on the edge : between literature and other cultural productions; between the classroom and the street, the book page and the museum's galleries, the movie theaters and the after-dinner conversation at the bar with a folklore act looming on the terrace. "Umbral," in fact, is once again the word that gives the last chapter its title. Written among its many intersections and universes, the book also emerges as a meditation on classification systems, labeling systems, and highlighting with keywords. The index is also an inventory, an implicit reflection on the way in which the organization of time into centuries and decades disaggregates words with which, with a hint of injustice, the years piece together pairs: the 60s / the pop years; the 90s, the years of neoliberalism; the 80s / the years of the Alfonsinista spring.

The book offers a grand theory about the aging of mass media. But also about the sumptuous nature of arts that have fallen into disuse, such as vinyl consumption or even reading on paper in the age of screens. It's a book that jumps between reflections on the classroom, the museum, the school, and the shopping mall. Much more so, the book could be inspired by "The Heir," a poem by Ariel Schettini: "When my sister had a son / we didn't know what he would have. / [whether] a new consumer on the market, / or an agent of environmental pollution. / Welcome," we told him. / Welcome to the classes and the classifications."

If humanism was a long process of domestication of the human, and if there isn't much hope for life outside of capitalism—even beyond the fact that apparently there isn't much hope within it either— for Daniel Link, schools should teach at least a few things, and fundamentally.

For example: that words like "Enlightenment," "Humanism," "Renaissance," or "Pop Culture" are just a few of the many ways that have been created, finally, to put not only objects on the shelves but also bodies and subjectivities; schools should at least teach us how to consume in the market in a different way than yesterday's advertising and today's social media algorithms teach us to do; and schools should teach us that, to have a true life project, we should all be able to build, at the very least, our own classification system.

A unique, completely personal classification system capable of selectively saying no to everything that comes our way with every click, or in between song changes on Spotify, YouTube, or in the overabundance of pop-up windows.

Perhaps the problem lies in this last point. Hasn't it been precisely the proliferation of so many classification systems—including the most personal and unique ones—that has ultimately generated the hyper-chaos of classifications?

If some or all of these things seem too complex, the last remaining function of the school is always the possibility of "teaching" something about the long line of time and the strange place in history where, when we were born, "we happened to fall." No matter how many crises in literature and art, in schools and museums are proclaimed—in the name of some good new technology—culture is the territory where identities are still negotiated.

Because, as can be read between the lines in the book, and despite the crises of classifications, of humanism, of literature, an inescapable truth stands out as defining: no blow of chaos will abolish history.

Classes. Literature and Dissent , by Daniel Link (Eterna Cadencia).